By way of explaining my much lamented departure from these pages (thanks for all the mail. My secretary will endeavour to address each of you individually) here are some dot points:

1. It's official: we are putting together a show for the 2008 Melbourne International Comedy Festival. The show is called Greatness Thrust Upon Them and it will be performed in the utterly gorgeous Trades Hall precinct, in the Old Council Chambers. Every time I go to the Old Council Chambers I feel the history of the room creaking all around me. Our show is about history. Arguably all shows are about history, apart from a show I saw in second year university in a carpark, which appeared to be about a woman living on a futuristic planet with a bad case of hives and nothing but a feather boa and an eggbeater with which to pass away the hours. And they were long hours. But I digress.

2. I've been locked away writing our kids' TV episode draft with our script editor, Doug McLeod. It has been a priceless experience and I now have separation anxiety and no idea how I'm going to ever write anything including a shopping list or a birthday card without Doug's help ever again. *Hyperventillates into a paper bag*.

3. Obviously the script for our comedy festival show is some way off completion but we had to submit our image and our show description for the comedy festival guide this week. Submitting an image when you don't have a cast, and a summary of a show you haven't finished writing is an interesting exercise in issue-avoidance. Saying nothing while purporting to say something extremely interesting is a fine art reserved in normal circumstances for print journalism and teenagers.

4. Look, I have skills too. I can do stuff. Just because everyone else knows how to use photoshop to the maximum degree of hilarity doesn't mean I don't throw a mean frisbee or make an excellent cup of tea. Just because everyone else spends their spare time replacing Britney's head with Graham's from the accounts department doesn't mean I've been wasting my time. Just because it took me an entire day of googling things like "rasterise" and calling Stew in Thailand to find out what a dpi was and how come 100mm kept reverting to 98.2mm before I could do a simple thing like colour in the tie on a famous photo DOES NOT MEAN I AM A STUPID PERSON. It does, however, mean that Stew was boarding a boat in Thailand while saying "go to the dropdown menu". It also means that our image was handed in just in the nick of time.

5. I spent two days last week in Warrnambool with my law-talking-job, including a particularly enjoyable evening in my hotel room drinking vile cups of tea with UHT millk and putting the finishing touches on the episode draft until midnight. Still, it was an interesting trip. The Law Foundation is running an educational and community programme in rural areas (hence my previous trip to Mildura) so it's interesting work and I wouldn't mind living by the sea, if it somehow was made compulsory.

So those are my dot points to excuse my absence. Not really much point making them dot points if the only reason they are dot points is because they are preceded by numbers, but shoosh, I tried. I am writing this from my office (the library) and I am flanked on one side by a ball of phlegm surrounded by a sniffing human being and on the other side by a quite crazy lady singing and laughing and occasionally talking in tongues.

It is nice to be home.

I have been missing from these pages over the past few days because I have been getting a lot of work done. The reasons for this are:

1. I have a scary deadline. An actual one. Written into a contract.

2. The year twelve exams have finished and hence there are not trillions of hysterically amused, breathlessly begossiped eighteen-year-olds answering obnoxiously ringing phones and looking daggers at me for asking them to keep it down. Also apparently not so many people in the over twenty age group wear clippy-noise-making heels or have ring tones that wolf whistle loudly, causing a ripple of untold hilarity through the studiously unstudious masses.

I'm sorry. I know it's a generalisation, but honestly, the difference between then and now (grey haired and bespectacled family history nerds and people using free internet and doing PhDs) is quite remarkable. I'm not saying I'd be interested in hanging with the family history nerds at a party, but (and this is where the year twelves have been tragically misled) the library is not a party and therefore I am on the side of the boring studious folk. You can tell this because I give lectures on this point repetitively in the manner of one of my parents discussing loud restaurants, the existence of mobile phones, or P plate drivers on freeways.

3. I am trying the early rising thing again. Today I was at gym at half seven. Next week, if history is anything to go by, I will contract hooping cough, gout, a peg leg or similar.

4. I am trying to get a lot of work done before the weekend. Why? Because after the weekend, Australia will either be run by a conservative white man or it will be run by a conservative white man. If it continues to be run by the racist lying rodent who currently holds the title of conservative white man running the country, I will be leaving to live on Mars. So I'm trying to get my affairs in order in case that becomes the sad reality. In the event of the other conservative white man becoming the leader, I will be looking to my friend Mister Senate, which as all the year twelves "studying" in the library know, is a check and/or balance and/or platform for loonies and people like Brian Harradine to flirt with the electorate and then do what they were going to do in the first place. If nothing changes and/or things get worse or somehow similarly depressing, I am hoping a foxy fast-talking superhero will arrive to save the day, possibly with the liberal distribution of bubble wrap.

Sadly this weekend I am only voting once, due to my friends having sorted out their own political opinions since the early days when I used to receive three or four calls asking who to vote for. Don't worry, I explained the choices as objectively as I could. It wasn't my fault they were "bored" and wanted to know "what to write in the box and hurry up I'm next in line". Gone are the days those guys call. I like to think it's because I educated them about politics but I know the real reason is that most of them are teachers or health professionals who know how to vote because their jobs are on the line. Either way, I leave my phone on each time I vote but nobody ever texts me any questions. Mostly just statements, none of which I will repeat here.

Anyway, I'm going to make the most of the pre-election silence in this library and also in my brain. Until then, vote well, vote often, see you on the other side.

I went to lunch with a friend of mine on Monday and he taught me a new word. Progrestination. It's when you procrastinate (for example) from writing your script by paying a bill, posting a vital legal document, or doing something else that actually helps you progress further in your life generally.

Of course, the problem with the concept of progrestination is that we can justify almost anything we do as "progress in life generally" such that reading about Lindsay Lohan in the free commuter newspaper is "research", watching animals dancing to Justin Timberlake on YouTube is "multimedia work", and having drinks with a friend is "useful" rather than just enjoyable.

For some of us, the internet provides the perfect opportunity for progrestination. All those emails you haven't replied to, all those outstanding errands - they all need to be done, and GUESS WHAT? Most of them can be done without leaving your desk! Huzzah! All I can say is that I'm very glad I haven't been lured yet by eBay. And shuttup, please don't tell me how easy it is. My combined hatred of shopping and fashion and love of wasting time on the internet and having crap I don't need delivered to my house makes me a prime target. I really don't need to know.

I say all this because I was contacted on these pages and notified of this site, the use of which can definitely be classified as progrestination, and which claims to be a whole new way of using the internet.

The possibility of discovering a "whole new way of using the internet" is so exciting and consequently potentially destructive to me as a writer (apparently Dave Eggers doesn't have internet in his house) that I haven't spent the hours there that I intend to. Check it out, though, it is an interesting project with the potential for great things.

Speaking of internet connections... Our Artist in Residency at Bundanon documents arrived in the mail this week, just after I hungrily read through an article on Arthur Boyd's new biography in the weekend paper. For those of you not keeping up with the news (SHAME), Standing There Productions are headed to NSW next August to participate in an Artist Residency in the Boyd's Bundanon property near Shoalhaven.

The residency looks totally gorgeous, inspiring, and I must learn to play the piano so we can make use of the baby grand in our loungeroom. On a more sober note, the documents warn of the following potential problems:

- mosquito bites
- sting rays
- snakes
- sun
- getting lost on bushwalks
- rain
- flood
- fire
- intermittent broadband connection
- no television reception

Of course, for us, these last two potential disasters loom large over the other insignificant problems mentioned. An excellent but terrifying result (and in fact our primary desire) is that we will have nothing to do other than our actual work - surrounded, as it turns out, by a beautiful atmosphere, deadly animals and a world teetering on the brink of natural disaster.

Personally, I can't wait. My screen saver is already a sublime photograph of Bundanon, and any time I think I might be too much of an information age junkie, I figure that for a month next year I'm going to be enjoying simpler pleasures. And I'm definitely taking bushwalking shoes and sunscreen.

By the way, the friend I went to lunch with also had one of these so I'm probably mixing in the wrong circles if I want to avoid technology. Bring on Bundanon!

I've finally figured out what I've been doing wrong. Today, having virtually exterminated two chattering year twelve students (honestly, four hours and they didn't do five minutes work - the woman next to me said "hear, hear" and someone else's head popped over the partition and said "I agree!")... I don't feel good about being the person who tells people off in the library, I really don't. Although, if those girls are reading this, your response to "Why don't you girls just go to a cafe?" could have been better thought out than "Why don't YOU go to a cafe", a random selection of answers to which could include:

1) Because you're a poo poo head
2) Because I'll get boy germs
3) Ner ner nee ner ner, I'm telling Mum
or
4) Shut your face, stink-breath.

So I figured it out. On my way up to the gorgeous reading room with the partitions and the talking, I peered into the newspaper room and the genealogy room. Finally: grey haired silence broken only by people asking how to turn on the computers.

Of course, I have to be using the newspaper collection or the genealogy collection in order to be here, which is excellent because I usually refer to the newspaper anyway, but if I make even the slightest noise, I face the considerable wrath of those in the over sixty bracket, whose requirements for large print does not exclude an unshakable moral conviction, at the core of which is BE QUIET IN THE LIBRARY.

I think I just moved up a demographic. Or three.

I have noticed a pattern over the past month. It goes like this:

1. Become extremely excited about development funding from Australian Children's Television Foundation.
2. Vow that this is the start of a new era.
3. Vow that era will be characterised by early rising (Operation Getting Out of Bed Like a Normal Person) and organisation.
4. Recruit frightening producer (Rita Walsh) to call me at eight in the mornings on Mondays with bit list of things to do.
5. Enlist others to meet me for morning coffees by way of introducing personal obligations into already onerous routine.
6. Rise early every day until it feels quite normal.
7. Become over-zealous and introduce morning runs and home made lunches to routine.
8. Contract bizarre virus called Croup, usually only contracted by babies.
9. Collapse and return to slacker life of haphazard work practices.
10. Become well again, repeat steps 1-7.
11. Contract bizarre virus without a name, the symptom of which is collapsing like a marionette in a Punch N Judy show.
12. Collapse and return to slacker life of haphazard work practices.

THEREFORE it is with some trepidation that I await Rita's 8am phone call on Monday, which will mark the beginning, once again, of step 1.

What's next on the "obscure virus" agenda? Scurvy? Consumption?

Possibly I should take Dee's advice from a previous post and just go with my usual rhythms. Problem is, that would involve me working in the wee hours of the morning and sleeping through the day, which is useful to nobody except me, and in fact it's not even useful to me.

Scurvy it is. Brace yourselves.

I know I've said it before, but there's nothing like a deadline.

Fake deadlines, real deadlines, as long as there's someone you're letting down if you don't make it, or as long as there's a definite end point beyond which you can't continue, it will work.

Par example, each day I know I have to get out of the library at a certain time. When the announcement comes over the loudspeaker saying that we need to get out because they're closing, I know there's half an hour left. I reckon my best work is thanks to that guy. If that guy could make threatening announcements all day, I'd be as prolific as Bryce Courtney. And possibly as unrelaxed.

Another very real deadline: the AC power on my laptop isn't working for some reason. I have forty minutes left before it goes to sleep.

So, you'll have to excuse me while I write a novel. A short one.

Want to flummox your local library?

Simple solution: send them some flowers.

I came into the library this morning, right on opening hour because I AM OFFICIALLY A MORNING PERSON after surviving almost a week of getting up well before 9am, which previously for me was not an actual time of day.

Usually, as the library opens, a sea of people streams in, jostling to make it past the security checkpoint, where somebody in a security uniform says, "Excuse me Sir, bags in the lockers, excuse me Miss, can I see your laptop? Excuse me, sorry, the skateboard has to go in a locker, my friend". This is usually a simple, streamlined process.

Not so this morning.

This morning, there was a bottleneck at the entrance as one security guy sifted through the stream of people, while a separate group of staff members engaged in a loud, wide-ranging, open discussion regarding the possible whereabouts of the lucky recipient of a lovely bunch of flowers, held like a dirty sock by someone wearing a nametag. The discussion was animated, involved several vastly differing points of view, and continued for some time.

It is now almost three in the afternoon. I am not at all convinced the flowers have made it to their rightful recipient. It is very possible they have been sent through several departments, and may soon appear in the New Release section, in case they belong to one of us.

Nice gesture, flowers.

If you're going to deliver them though, make sure you get a bit specific with the address.